Thousands Work as Slaves in Brazil s Charcoal Industry brazzil.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from brazzil.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For more than a year, Antonio slept with a wasp nest humming above his head. Not in the open, but inside a small brick house on a farm a couple of hours from Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.
Outside, a dozen charcoal kilns burned wood day and night, filling the air with smoke, next to piles of logs illegally cut from the endangered Cerrado biome, South America’s largest savanna.
Antonio, who asked for his real name not to be disclosed, worked feeding native trees into the kilns to make charcoal.
That fuel, used by steel mills and for the traditional Brazilian barbecue, has links to
The body said these rules allow its members - which account for about 85% of Brazil's steel - to make "carbon-neutral" steel, as the greenhouse gas emissions from their production are offset by the forests planted by the mills. DIRTY INDUSTRY In addition to the climate cost of charcoal production and use, a human price is being paid, labor officials say. Since 1995, about 2,830 people have been found working in slavery-like conditions at charcoal production sites in Brazil, with 2,080 of them using wood from native forests, according to data supplied by Mauricio Krepsky, the head of Brazil's anti-slavery department DETRAE.
Sight Magazine - Slaves to deforestation: Labour abuses fuel Brazil s Amazon destruction sightmagazine.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sightmagazine.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.